


The Gift

by charlottesometimes



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Background drabbles, Eventually Will has a nice day, Gen, How Will Graham became Will Graham, Will Graham as a kid, Will Graham in New Orleans, Will Graham in college
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-12
Updated: 2013-10-12
Packaged: 2017-12-29 04:16:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charlottesometimes/pseuds/charlottesometimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For most of his life, Will didn't think of the empathy as a gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gift

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first posted fan fiction. I have, in my life, written many, but never put any on the internet to be read by others. If anyone reads this, constructive criticism would be very, very much appreciated. :)

Will Graham clicked down the page, and reached the end of another gruesome Tattlecrime.com article. It had accumulated 349 comments in just a few hours. He felt a surge of pride, pride at having gotten the story--he'd had to bribe, sleep with, or blackmail that police detective, but he'd done it before, and he would do it again. More than 300 people were talking about something they wouldn't have talked about otherwise. 

The high-pitched e-mail notification sound startled Will, brought him back to himself from the mind of Freddie Lounds.  
It was not a pleasant sensation to leave her mind. Freddie was stable, happy, enjoyed her life. He couldn't fault her for choosing to do something that satisfied her. And she had a code--the code was that the world deserved every story there was to tell, especially the ones that someone didn't want told, even if they had a good reason. It was just a different perspective. At that moment, Freddie's smirking, aggressive, witty mind lingering within his, Will couldn't clearly remember why that was wrong. 

Will sighed, and did his best to screw up his face into an expression of anger as he looked at the fifth email he'd received linking to the story about him. He was doing his best to be angry with Freddie Lounds--because he was angry with her, in some part of himself. But anger was something he had to nurse in order to sustain, lest it be obliterated in an accidental slip into the other's mind. 

He scrolled to the e-mail Freddie had sent him the day before, and reopened it. He ought to haves deleted it. He wasn't safe around it right now. "Will, or Special Agent Graham," it read. "I just wanted to know if you'd like to comment for the story I'm writing. Like the first time I mentioned you, it touches upon the nature of your work for the FBI, and your unique talents. Give me a call or send a comment my way if you feel up to it. I'd love to have your side of the story. Freddie L." 

He could feel her ambition and desire in the words, see her determined face as she typed the terse request. He imagined her long nails clicking on the keyboard, kept long despite the impediment because she was a superwoman and had to be everything at once. Had to be spectacular in every possible way. He was so tempted to give her the little thing she asked for, to give her that. She could update the story with Will Graham's own side of it. 

He'd done this before and nearly been fired. A young reporter in New Orleans, when Will was just a beat cop there, had tried to bribe him. Will had looked at the young man, this silly young man who clearly had no talent for picking out the corrupt cops, clearly wasn't the best judge of character, and seen in his eyes the desperation of youthful striving. He saw so much defeat there. He took the money for the kid's sake; he'd felt so bad about taking it afterwards that it sat on top of his fridge until he moved years later. He'd told the kid everything he wanted to know. Even now, after ten years and an Internal Affairs investigation, he could feel the bright crest of that kid's triumph at having scored the story. 

That had been a moment of particular weakness. Will didn’t think he generally got so lost in other people that he forgot his own ends in such a dramatic way. But it happened, and it was terrifying when it did. 

This was why he sometimes had to nurse anger. Anger, disgust--the non-empathic emotions were useful when it came to protecting yourself, and Will knew he had to use them to do that even though it was so much harder for him then for others. He knew Jack would be furious if he replied to Freddie, and he understood why; it could endanger Will's reputation and thus his position, it could endanger cases, it would encourage a woman known to contaminate crime scenes. But also, it would be a win for Freddie, and Jack Crawford was always keeping score. Those two were more alike than Will would ever suggest to Jack. He would be furious. 

Will deleted Freddie's e-mail with a pang for her loss and rubbed his eyes. Fighting Freddie in his head had given him a headache. He popped two aspirin. 

* * *  
“I just don’t understand how a person can conscience having all that money when they pay their workers in pennies,” Elaine said. She sat beside Will on the dorm room bed, naked save for socks. “Corporate profit is what’s wrong with the developed world, and part of what’s wrong with the undeveloped world.”  
“They keep so much of that money when they could distribute it evenly,” Will replied, nodding. Elaine offered him the joint she was smoking, but he refused. “People’s families need that. Homes would be broken less often if poverty didn’t affect so many families. It creates stress.” He shifted on the bed. “I know exactly what you mean.”  
Elaine rolled her eyes. Disgust registered on her face for the briefest instant, but Will caught it, and was taken out of his empathy for Elaine’s perspective and into her feeling of revulsion for him. “You’re doing it again,” she said gently. “Being me rather than being with me.”  
Will looked away, feeling stupid. He pulled a blanket up to cover his exposed body. “Sorry love,” he mumbled.  
“I call you love, you don’t call me love,” she replied.  
“Right.”  
“What do you think about it?”  
What did he think about anything? Will’s world was so big even when he lived on the head of a pin, without his venturing with his mind into the wider world. He didn’t really have political views, or views on global trade ties, or views on international wars. He could learn facts and names and dates, but something kept all that from coalescing into fervently held beliefs. Something kept it all fractured, pieces of ideologies floating with equal plausibility through his mind.  
Elaine was certain that was just his youth and inexperience, and that she could coax him into developing political and social opinions as strong as hers just as she had coaxed him into developing definite opinions about what he wanted or did not want in bed, and just as she’d coaxed him into finally giving solid form to his own opinion of himself. The politics were taking longer than either the sex or the self-image had taken. He wasn’t sure he would ever please her, in this respect.  
“I’m starting to feel like we’ll never have a real conversation,” Elaine said. There was a subtle savagery in her voice. Will could feel her frustration and anger at having put so much time into Will only to find he would never be what she wanted him to become. He could feel her realizing the irony of the fact that he, the ultimate lump of malleable clay, couldn’t become this one thing: Solid. He could have become anything else she wanted him to be.  
* * *  
Will Graham's jaw was clenched shut, as it often was when he was fighting to see through his own eyes. The sixteen kids around him--it was his first day at a new elementary school--so clearly saw him with fear and even a little disgust. His rumpled hand-me-downs. His broken glasses. His dirty back pack. His southern drawl. These northern kids with lawyer fathers were afraid of him, and it made him afraid of himself. They were disgusted by him, and it made him disgusted by himself.  
He walked down the aisle to a desk in the back row. He could hear his father’s words from the morning in his mind: Don’t you scare them, boy. Don’t you be your creepy self. (Joking, claps Will on the back.) Act like anybody else, okay slugger? Make some friends. You need some friends.  
Those kinds of words from his father formed a sort of chorus to his life, a refrain it always returned to: Don’t scare ‘em, boy. Don’t scare the neighbors. Don’t scare my buddies off. Act normal. Don’t act like you. Look up, boy. Relax. Calm down. You scare people. What’s wrong with you? Nothing is as bad as you act like it all is. Relax. What in the hell is wrong, Will? What’s wrong with you?  
Sometimes I’m afraid of what you might be thinking in that head of yours, boy. Why can’t you look at people? 

"Why do you smell like fish?" a snickering boy whispered once Will had sat down. 

"Because I used to live on a marina," Will whispered back, terrified. "And I don't have a mom so we don't wash our clothes very much." 

The boy paused, taken aback, and in that moment Will knew his words had further frightened the boy. But he didn't know how not to frighten. He didn't know what he should have said. 

Then the boy laughed, glancing at a girl who had been listening. The girl laughed too. They both laughed harder. Will's own emotion began to break through theirs: Shame. His cheeks began to burn. 

"Excuse me, Joshua, Celeste?" the teacher said. "Is something funny about the parts of speech." 

No no no no no don't get them in trouble, Will thought. 

The kids stopped laughing. "No," the girl gasped. "We were just remembering something funny my brother said." 

"You can socialize later," the teacher said. She turned back to the blackboard without further humiliating the kids, and Will finally let out the breath he had been holding. 

"We ought to call him merman," the girl whispered to her friend. 

* * *  
Elaine’s patience came from her curiosity: She wouldn’t let waiting prevent her discovery. She wanted to discover everything. Her eyes drank Will in as he struggled in his own head to accept her closeness in the dark dorm. They stood, faces inches apart, her fingers tentatively grazing the top button on his date-night shirt. Her face was a question: When may I go on?  
Will’s dick was cold and quiet, whereas in the car, at a safe distance, listening to this wonderful woman talk with her glossed lips, it had been hard. Now he felt the old pressure to be present and to be himself. And the old, animal fear of proximity, impossible to explain. He was a mess of his own fear, Elaine’s almost contradictory mix of tenderness and ambition, and his own disappointment with himself.  
Elaine reached down and took his hand. Lifted it to his own button. Stepped back. "Undo it," she said quietly. 

Will did. 

She stepped forward again and took the second button in her fingers. Undid that one. Looked up at him. Her face was open--she was as much trying to read him as he was naturally reading her. "Ok?" she asked. 

He struggled. Her eyes softened. He felt her feeling his fear. Somehow, it relaxed him. He felt honest. It felt good. 

"Ok," he breathed.  
* * *  
“So she’s bawling, right? And Graham just fucking lost it. Didn’t ya, Graham?”  
Will nodded, smiling to reflect the expressions of the other men at the restaurant table. He was churning shame, raw and unadulterated. His expression was relaxed, engaged. He could feel the other men at the table willing him to leave, the women at the table willing Officer Ben Wallace to shut up.  
“I mean he was crying like a widow,” Wallace continued, hefting a beer to his lips. He drank deeply. Will drank from his own beer, too.  
New Orleans. He’d been there, on the police force, for almost a year. He’d never drunk so much or been so miserable in his life as he was in that first year. “He actually got up without saying anything, put his coat on, and let the door slam behind him like he was in a soap opera.”  
This was how Wallace drove Will away from these occasional after-work gatherings. It always worked. But Will made it a point to come and have a beer or two before he went home to have several more alone.  
“Yeah, yeah, Wallace, we get it,” Will said. “I’m not up to your mandards.”  
“Mandards?” asked an Officer Brandis. Holly Brandis. She was sort of wonderful.  
“Man standards,” Will said.  
The women at the table laughed. Wallace looked vaguely amused. The other men looked like they would humor him this once.  
Will’s stomach was almost upset from keeping in the shame. Or it might’ve been the whiskey he imbibed in the car on the way from work, to be ready for the onslaught.  
“If I recall he solved that case,” Brandis said, dipping fried crab into a sauce and bringing it to her lips.  
“Yeah, but somehow I doubt that crying like it was his kid that died was part of the reason,” Wallace said. He looked back at Will. “Sorry man, I’m just tryin’ to socialize you properly. Somehow you never seemed to have learned it’s not okay to cry on duty.”  
Never learned it’s not okay. Will almost laughed. Did this man not conceive of the possibility of knowing you ought not be something, socially speaking, and that still being you even so?  
(In the back of Will’s mind he is a child. A woman he knows as “Aunt Lorraine” from daycare stands above him with a bottle of Ambien in one hand and a bottle of scotch in the other. “Drink this, darling,” she says. Her eyes are full of something he can’t recognize for what it is: Lust. “Just drink it.” He is afraid.)  
“What was that woman’s name again?” Brandis asked kindly. “The one who drugged and butchered that kid?”  
“Lorraine Briggs,” Will said without thinking.  
“Stay out of this, Brandis,” Wallace said.  
“What’s my percentage, Wallace?” Will asked. “And what’s yours?”  
“I let you have the easy ones,” Wallace replied dismissively. He finished his beer in one go. Will realized that was a great idea and followed suit, then ordered a double whiskey.  
* * *  
He had a sandwich packed for lunch, and could see how pathetic he was as he walked through the lunchroom alone to an empty table. He could see himself through all those eyes, and he was afraid of himself. He was so different, such an unknown. Even though he knew the particulars of his own life, they seemed not to explain how he could be so different, and he felt himself an alien. 

He wasn't aware of it when another boy stood beside his empty table a few minutes later, lost in the eyes that kept darting his way, until the other boy tapped him on the shoulder. 

He glanced at the boy's eyes and immediately a peace came over Will. 

This boy was one of the Safe People. His expression was serene. His eyes were flat and still. He was smirking, but the expression seemed somehow false. Will looked at the boy, and did not see through his eyes. Which meant that Will could, for a moment, once again see through his own eyes. And he realized he was in pain, in need of friendship, and desperately confused about how to get it. 

He had met Safe People before. Not often, and never before in his peer group. They were immediately apparent to him, just as the emotions of other kinds of people were immediately apparent. They were bag boys at the grocery store, or waitresses with cigarette breath, or cops on a street corner. They were blank, somehow, and being near them allowed Will to feel what it was like to be just around another person, for a moment, rather than to be inside them. 

"What's up?" Will asked. 

"You really lived on a marina?" the boy asked. He had burned areas on one side of his head where his buzz-cut black hair didn’t grow. He wore someone else’s dog tags. Will would later find out he’d stolen them.  
Will nodded.  
“Did you ride speeds boats?” The boy sat down in the chair beside Will, and Will scooted away slowly, hoping the motion would not be detected.  
“Sometimes.” Will knew that even if he couldn’t feel this boy’s judgment, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. But his mind, around Safe People, was finally clear enough to put some thought into how to behave. “They’re great. I can drive one. I’m going to get a boating license when I’m old enough. It’s easy. For me.”  
The boy’s name was Rudy, and he was disliked by his peers. Will and Rudy became fast friends, hanging out at Rudy’s spacious but messy home with his younger brother Jason.  
Jason was not a Safe Person. He was, conversely, a small trembling animal. His feelings were intense and always, always laced with fear, usually of Rudy.  
The other kids in school were afraid of Rudy, too. Will could feel their fear of him just as he could feel their fear of himself. But the fears were very different. Will was an unknown, a creature that evoked the particular terror of that which you do not understand; Rudy was a simple savage. He pulled girls pigtails hard enough that they fell from monkey bars and twisted their ankles. He stole homework not for his own benefit but just to shred it and watch his victim search for it frantically. He casually hit, burned and bit Jason. He peed on frogs, lizards and mice, laughing as they squirmed to avoid the hot stream. And he hurt himself. Cut, burned, punctured. Set fire crackers and intentionally let them blow up in his face. Toyed with a water moccasin one night until Will, frightened, killed it with a rock. Took to drinking stolen liquor until he was sick, forcing Jason and Will to do the same.  
And when Rudy hurt something, even himself, he opened up to Will’s gifts like a levy. The mixture of emotionlessness and intentional masking that hid him from Will and made him Safe fell away, and Will could feel his pure joy. And looking at Rudy’s handiwork— torn homework, a burn mark on Jason’s arm—he could feel Rudy’s triumphal pride.  
Will got in trouble by proxy a few times. When he was sent home for helping to loosen the straps of a swing so that someone would fall, his father was not angry. He was almost happy. Happy Will had a friend. Will could feel like a muscle working the effort his father put into suppressing a fear that Will had enjoyed the notion of tormenting someone. (Will had enjoyed it. Rudy had enjoyed it.) Will was confused by his father’s conflicting emotions.  
So he smiled in imitation of him.  
“He’s not afraid of you?” his father asked, driving him home.  
Will shook his head no, still smiling proudly.  
“Atta boy.”  
* * *  
He tried to sit up, to feel less exposed, to gain some control. Elaine pushed him back onto the mattress. He was afraid. She was eager. She propped herself on his chest and looked into his eyes. "How did it feel?" she asked. 

"It felt good," he said, voice husky. He was panting, but from a combination of fear and arousal, not from pure lust. 

Elaine's face immediately registered a mixture of exasperation and sadness. She had detected the lie, and he could suddenly feel how badly she wanted to make him feel good. "How did it really feel?" she asked quietly. "Come on Will." 

Will paused. Often in moments like this Elaine felt something he could not put a name to. It was like putting a hand out to him. And when it took it, he felt like she felt what he felt, too. He would realize, years later, after years of deliberately learning to talk about feelings for the sakes of various staff psychologists, that that had been trust. 

He took the phantom hand. "I didn't like that," he said. "I like only a little bit of pain." 

She began kissing and licking a trail down his abdomen. Will began to lose sight of anyone's emotions. Halfway down she nipped his tender skin with her teeth. He gasped, and was immediately both embarrassed and turned on by his own ability to make such a sound. He generally kept everything in, quiet. 

"Ah, there's honesty," Elaine said. He could hear warmth and acceptance in her voice.  
* * *  
Rudy’s own father was an often-absent hunter and wilderness guide, a park ranger with a penchant for long camping trips away from home. He was a rowdy, uncaring joie de vivre who was afraid of Rudy and dismissive of Jason.  
One day about a year after Will met Rudy, Rudy’s parents went together on a camping trip and left Rudy to watch Jason. Will had felt their trepidation and their faith as they left.  
In memory, Will always felt sorry for them. At the time, he just felt Jason’s fear at being left alone and—a feeling all his own, something that was happening more and more as he grew—he resented the parents for not seeing that in their younger son.  
In memory he also felt shame, of course.  
It was a sunny afternoon, the windows left open to fill the den and family room with light. The boys played Atari in the living room for a few hours, Will and Rudy making jabs at Jason’s ineptitude. The teasing made Rudy gleeful because it made Jason sad. Will, as usual, found himself swinging from one place to another, teasing Jason at Rudy’s urging, then turning to Jason to soothe the feelings he himself had hurt.  
This not unusual dynamic often made Rudy angry, which was why Will sometimes absorbed completely into Rudy’s joy and abandoned Jason. That was beginning to happen that day.  
But before it did, Rudy chose to change the game.  
“I want to show you something,” he said.  
They went together into the den, which was ostensibly another family room but which was so full of the outdoorsy décor of Rudy’s father that it felt distinctly to be of an older man’s world. Will felt even more like he didn’t belong there than he did in most places.  
Rudy went to a dark wood cabinet and clicked open a double door. Produced a hand gun. Jason and Will stood around him like attendants to a priest.  
Rudy hefted the metal, weighty object in his right hand. “I saw him put it away one time,” he said. “He didn’t know I saw.”  
The boys were hushed. “What’s it for?” Will asked.  
“For?” Rudy scoffed. “It’s for shooting, you idiot.”  
“I don’t think you should have it out,” Jason breathed. Will could feel the younger boy’s edginess. Jason watched the gun like it was a snake.  
“He doesn’t keep his guns loaded in the house,” Rudy said. “He told me when he showed me his hunting shot guns.” He put it to his head.  
“Rudy, put that down—”  
He pulled the trigger. A dry click and nothing.  
Will’s stomach swooped with intense fear immediately followed by intense relief. He could feel Jason feeling the same beside him. Rudy laughed, and Will felt his own fear reflected back to him as Rudy’s amusement. For the first time he glimpsed why others might not like Rudy.  
Rudy put the gun against Jason’s chest. “Stick ‘em up,” he said.  
Jason looked like a statue. He seemed to think that if he didn’t move, Rudy wouldn’t either. “Please,” he whispered. “You don’t know—”  
Rudy pulled the trigger again with a click.  
A crack so loud it obliterated sound coincided with an almost cartoonishly bright red spray erupting from Jason’s back.  
He lay on the ground a moment later in his own blood, the hole more through his ribs than his heart. Will remembered that detail. It meant there might have been something he could have done.  
But he didn’t. He stood there feeling glee. He felt Rudy’s glee, and he was frozen with it, unmoving in his pursuit of that pleasure, letting it wash over him. It was paralyzing—almost as paralyzing as the smaller, suppressed whirlpool of fear of death he felt from Jason’s dimming eyes.  
He felt both. But it was the glee he noticed sliding onto his features, so that he could move his head to the side to meet Rudy’s triumphant expression.  
He didn’t like to remember that.  
Before that, his father had said Will scared people. From then on, Will’s father was himself afraid of his son.  
* * *  
“Were either of them gay, Mrs. Mortens,” Will said gently. But he said it.  
The gray-haired forty-year-old woman opened her mouth, her wet eyes bulging. “My god,” she said. “The idea.” She looked like she might be sick.  
Brandis stood between them, clearly conflicted.  
“Will, apologize,” she said after a moment. Mortens had begun to cry.  
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Mortens,” Will said blankly. The woman was looking at him like he was crazy. He began to wonder why, but encountered the wall of a fort, inside his mind. So he stopped. “I’m sorry for your loss.”  
“Come on.” Brandis took Mrs. Mortens by the shoulders and guided her out of the living room, where her husband and son lay dead in pools of blood on the floor, their pants around both their ankles.  
A pendulum swung before his eyes. They were clothed. It swung again. They were seated, one on the couch, one in the recliner.  
A man comes in quietly, up behind Mr. Mortens first. He is efficient. He is looking to settle a score. Not there for sex—no. There are no signs of either real care or self-indulgent abuse on the bodies, no signs of the crime being really about the bodies. No, this crime was either about these men’s minds or about something they’d done.  
Yet there was a pleasure taken in the ending of these lives. The throats are cut deeply, widely, voraciously.  
Then the bodies are humiliated, the pants pulled down, blood—blood splashed between their ass cheeks to give the impression of a bloody rape. But there is no tissue tearing.  
A gang killing, or a bookie sending a message. Maybe drug warfare.  
Brandis came back into the living room, her brow wrinkled.  
“Will?”  
“Yeah.” Will was arranging the bodies in his mind.  
“When did you stop feeling for them?”  
“For who?” He did not look away from the scene.  
“The victims.”  
Will looked at Brandis at last. “What do you mean?”  
“You used to see as much from their perspective as from the killers,” she said. “You don’t anymore.” She looked troubled. Will didn’t want her to look troubled.  
Without thinking, trying to be honest with this woman he has liked since he met her, he answered: “Wouldn’t everyone rather be guilty than afraid?”  
* * *  
After he took the aspirin, Will was restless. He tried to examine why, but came up against a fort. So he stopped.  
Then he called Abigail.  
She answered on the second ring.  
“Do you want to go to the zoo, or something?” Will asked without preamble.  
Abigail took a moment to orient herself. “Sure,” she said brightly when she had. “Anything to get out of here. You’ll pick me up?”  
“Unless there’s something you’d rather do.”  
“Like I said, anything to get out.”  
“I mean, you’re not a little girl, I know—”  
“Will, I want to go to the zoo. Pick me up at noon.”  
Will smiled.


End file.
